Publications
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Newsletters: a weekly summary of news about Bitcoin and LN development.
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Blog posts: Occasional updates and reference material from the Optech team.
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Podcast Episodes: Audio discussions of our newsletters.
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Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #349
This week’s newsletter describes a proposal for speeding up Bitcoin Core initial block download, with a proof-of-concept implementation that shows a roughly 5x speed up compared to Bitcoin Core’s defaults. Also included are our regular sections summarizing a Bitcoin Core PR Review Club meeting, announcing new releases and release candidates, and describing notable changes to popular Bitcoin infrastructure projects.
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Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #348
This week’s newsletter links to an educational implementation of elliptic curve cryptography for Bitcoin’s secp256k1 curve. Also included are our regular sections with descriptions of discussions about changing consensus, announcements of new releases and release candidates, and summaries of notable changes to popular Bitcoin infrastructure software.
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Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #347 Recap Podcast
Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by Sjors Provoost and Antoine Poinsot to discuss Newsletter #347.
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Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #347
This week’s newsletter describes a proposal to allow LN to support upfront and hold fees based on burnable outputs, summarizes discussion about testnets 3 and 4 (including a hard fork proposal), and announces a plan to begin relaying certain transactions containing taproot annexes. Also included are our regular sections summarizing selected questions and answers from the Bitcoin Stack Exchange, announcing new releases and release candidates, and describing notable changes to popular Bitcoin infrastructure projects.
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Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #346 Recap Podcast
Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by Matt Morehouse, Yong Yu, Alejandro De La Torre, Jan B, and Marco De Leon to discuss Newsletter #346.
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Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #346
This week’s newsletter summarizes a discussion about LND’s updated dynamic feerate adjustment system. Also included are our regular sections describing recent changes to services and client software, announcing new releases and release candidates, and summarizing recent merges to popular Bitcoin infrastructure software.
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Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #345 Recap Podcast
Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by Sindura Saraswathi, Christian Kümmerle, and Stéphan Vuylsteke to discuss Newsletter #345.
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Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #345
This week’s newsletter looks at an analysis of P2P traffic experienced by a typical full node, summarizes research into LN pathfinding, and describes a new approach for creating probabilistic payments. Also included are our regular sections summarizing a Bitcoin Core PR Review Club meeting, announcing new releases and release candidates, and describing notable changes to popular Bitcoin infrastructure projects.
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Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #344 Recap Podcast
Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by Matt Morehouse, Matt Corallo, and Hunter Beast to discuss Newsletter #344.
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Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #344
This week’s newsletter announces the disclosure of a vulnerability affecting old versions of LND and summarizes a discussion about the Bitcoin Core Project’s priorities. Also included are our regular sections describing discussion related to consensus changes, announcing new releases and release candidates, and summarizing notable changes to popular Bitcoin infrastructure software.
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Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #343 Recap Podcast
Dave Harding and Mike Schmidt discuss Newsletter #343.
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Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #343
This week’s newsletter summarizes a post about having full nodes ignore transactions that are relayed without being requested first. Also included are our regular sections with popular questions and answers from the Bitcoin Stack Exchange, announcements of new releases and release candidates, and summaries of notable changes to popular Bitcoin infrastructure software.
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Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #342 Recap Podcast
Dave Harding and Mike Schmidt are joined by Bastien Teinturier and Joost Jager discuss Newsletter #342.
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Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #342
This week’s newsletter describes an idea for allowing mobile wallets to settle LN channels without extra UTXOs and summarizes continued discussion about adding a quality-of-service flag for LN pathfinding. Also included are our regular sections describing recent changes to clients, services, and popular Bitcoin infrastructure software.
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Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #341 Recap Podcast
Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt discuss Newsletter #341.
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Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #341
This week’s newsletter summarizes continued discussion about probabilistic payments, describes additional opinions about ephemeral anchor scripts for LN, relays statistics about evictions from the Bitcoin Core orphan pool, and announces an updated draft for a revised BIP process. Also included are our regular sections summarizing a Bitcoin Core PR Review Club meeting, announcing new releases and release candidates, and describing notable changes to popular Bitcoin infrastructure software.
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Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #340 Recap Podcast
Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Mike Schmidt are joined by Matt Morehouse, Johan Halseth, Pieter Wuille, Sergi Delgado, Bastien Teinturier, Oleksandr Kurbatov, Antoine Poinsot and Bob McElrath to discuss Newsletter #340.
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Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #340
This week’s newsletter announces a fixed vulnerability affecting LDK, summarizes discussion about zero-knowledge gossip for LN channel announcements, describes the discovery of previous research that can be applied to finding optimal cluster linearizations, provides an update on the development of the Erlay protocol for reducing transaction relay bandwidth, looks at tradeoffs between different scripts for implementing LN ephemeral anchors, relays a proposal for emulating an
OP_RANDopcode in a privacy-preserving manner with no consensus changes required, and points to renewed discussion about lowering the minimum transaction feerate. -
Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #339 Recap Podcast
Mark “Murch” Erhardt and Dave Harding are joined by Matt Morehouse and 0xB10C to discuss Newsletter #339.
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Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #339
This week’s newsletter describes a vulnerability affecting older versions of LDK, looks at a newly disclosed aspect of a vulnerability originally published in 2023, and summarizes renewed discussion about compact block reconstruction statistics. Also included are our regular sections summarizing popular questions on the Bitcoin Stack Exchange, announcing new releases and release candidates, and describing recent changes to popular Bitcoin infrastructure software.
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